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Charges expected after assault on Kalispell based ISP Montana Sky Internet
Kalispell police are investigating a suspected computer crime that buried a local Internet provider with 20,000 e-mails an hour Thursday.
By Chery Sabol
The Daily Inter Lake
"It was one of the worst attacks that’s ever taken place" at the business, said Fred Weber, owner of Montana Sky Internet in Kalispell.
He intends to press charges against whoever tried to send an electronic chain letter to tens of thousands of addresses, both valid and invalid, at Montana Sky.
"They hogged every available port on the e-mail server," Weber said.
"It was caught quickly and will be dealt with severely," he said.
The attack was launched locally, he said.
"It’s clear in my mind, they were trying to make themselves a lot of customers to reply to a get-rich-quick chain letter," Weber said.
The letter, like its ancestral paper version, asks recipients to send cash to a name on a list. The recipient then adds his or her name to the list with the idea that others will eventually send cash to him or her.
Using a sophisticated software program, the Internet intruder began sending the letter to virtually every name or word or combination imaginable, followed by @montanasky.net.
The software even concealed its approach, scrambling the names so it wouldn’t appear so clearly alphabetically sequential that the Montana Sky server would catch it as spam and shut it down, Weber said.
The software program established simultaneous connections to the company’s server, emitting about 20,000 e-mails per hour.
"Mostly, we’re bulletproof" from Internet invasion, but this attack effectively paralyzed the server for others trying to send e-mail.
The source of the hours-long disruption was identified and the user was knocked off the Internet. But the offending software soon regained a connection and continued its work.
Eventually, a Montana Sky employee had to disconnect the server, like flipping out the lights in a grand hotel, to stop the attack, Weber said.
"I don’t know why (the sender) attacked us," he said.
He is confident that the offender will be caught and prosecuted under a misdemeanor computer crimes law, he said.
"You’re not anonymous on the Internet. We can see you," he said.
Detective Sgt. Brian Fulford of the Kalispell Police Department said the e-mail was a pyramid-type scheme that tries to dupe people into paying money to someone on a list in hopes of advancing on the list and becoming the recipient of someone else’s payment.
It’s just a higher-tech version, Fulford.
He is already investigating what could be a felony computer crime in Kalispell in an unrelated matter.
Montana Sky’s problem portends more police work devoted to computer crime, Fulford said.
"I’m afraid this is a coming thing," he said.
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Pyramid scheme shuts down Montana Internet provider
KALISPELL (AP) — An Internet attack sending 20,000 e-mails an hour shut down a local Internet provider last week.
USA Today
Detective Brian Fulford said the strike was part of an electronic pyramid scheme asking Internet users to send cash to someone on a list. The payment would put the sender on the list and, theoretically, entitle the sender to money from someone else later.
Fred Weber, owner of Montana Sky Internet, said it was one of the worst attacks that has ever happened to his business.
"They hogged every available port on the e-mail server," Weber said.
Thursday’s attack kept other subscribers from sending e-mail, he added.
The electronic intruder used software that sent messages to almost every combination of letters and almost every possible Montana Sky e-mail address. The software also scrambled the order of the messages so Montana Sky’s server couldn’t immediately detect a sequence, identify the messages as junk e-mail and screen them.
The source of the hours-long disruption was identified and the user was knocked off the Internet. But the offending software soon regained a connection and continued its work.
Eventually, a Montana Sky employee had to disconnect the server.
Weber said the attack was apparently local and that he thinks the attacker will be caught.
"You’re not anonymous on the Internet," Weber said. "We can see you."
Copyright 2003 The Associated Press.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2003-04-08-isp-attack_x.htm
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